Author Emily LaBarge Grapples With a Terrifying Experience in Her Book 'Dog Days'

Writing about one's own life can be extremely challenging. Writing about difficult experiences is even more complicated. Canadian author Emily LaBarge tackles the task of retelling an extremely painful event in her book Dog Days, which is one of The New York Times and Literary Hub's most anticipated books.

A New York Times review notes that Emily made a conscious choice not to fall into the trap of "the trauma plot," which she says reduces one's life and its characters to the effects of one traumatic event. But what was the traumatic event that happened to Emily LaBarge? Here's what we know.

London-Based writer Emily LaBarge wrote about the traumatic event that happened to her and her family in Dog Days. When Emily and her family were staying on a Caribbean island in December of 2001, six masked men broke into their hotel room and held them hostage.

They put a crocheted blanket over Emily and pressed a gun to the back of her head. They whispered, "We don’t want to hurt you, but we will," Emily recalled, per The New York Times.

Emily was on vacation with her mom, dad, and sister at the time. They were watching Mrs. Doubtfire when the invasion occurred, and Emily recalls one of the intruders laughing along to the movie. They also played one of the family's CDs, "Agnus Dei," on repeat. The masked men stayed in their room for eight hours.

In an essay for Granta, Emily writes about details like the fact that the men brandished machetes. They tied her father's hands and hit him in the back of the head with a blunt object. Three of the men left eventually, leaving the other three "in charge."

Emily writes that as the men played her family's choir music on repeat, she began to hallucinate that she was experiencing Mass for her own death.

Emily's book talks about grappling with what happened to her; she's faced with the difficult task of attempting to turn the traumatic event into a narrative. She is torn between creating a coherent, "reassuring" narrative, or "the good story," and the complicated reality that includes details that "the good story" leaves out, per Transit Books.

The Shakespeare and Company writes, "The book explores not the incident itself but the psychic 'mark' it left — its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the instability of storytelling after trauma, the pressure to produce coherent versions for police, insurers, or therapists, and the unsettling sense that the world itself had changed in the aftermath."

The description for Dog Days elaborates on this: "How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms?"